Viewing web sites on the World Wide Web has become extremely popular in recent years. The easy access to an almost limitless amount of information is very appealing to users of all ages. Typically, user machines such as personal computers are connected to distributed remotely located web servers via the Internet. FIG. 1 shows a conventional network where a user machine 1 can connect to remote web servers 2 via Internet 3. Although two user machines 1 and three remote servers are depicted in FIG. 1, it should be understood that the network may include multiple ones of these components. For example, the network may include multiple, logically connected remote web servers 2 available to provide the user machine 1 with internet browsing capabilities.
Web sites are typically stored on a web server and include textual and graphical information formatted according to predetermined protocols. For example, the protocol may be static, e.g., HTML (“Hyper Text Markup Language”) having fixed tag semantics and a fixed tag set, or dynamic, e.g., SGML (“Standard Generalized Markup Language”) having dynamic tag sets defined by ISO 8879. Web sites are then interpreted by a user program, such as, for example, Internet Explorer, manufactured by Microsoft Corporation, or embedded browsers such as Opera, which resides on the user computer or other device.
When a user wishes to browse the Web, the user machine 1, via a web browser 4, transmits a request to access a Uniform Resource Locator (“URL”) address corresponding to an HTML page residing on the remote web server 2. The user machine is authenticated by the remote server if needed, and the server prepares and transmits to the user machine the requested HTML page.
Web pages are commonly designed to be displayed on fully capable personal computer displays. Sometimes, however, a display unit that is used in conjunction with a game platform or a non-personal-computer-based device, such as a GPS, PDA, cell phone, etc., may have a different set of display capabilities. This can result in a display that may be blurred, out of position or having the wrong size, thus resulting in a display that does not initially show the most important information on the page due to the reformatting required to fit the content to the display. This mismatch between the fetched web page and the available display capabilities may occur every time the user requests the particular web page, thus forcing the user to adjust display settings (e.g., zoom, scrolls, or other display settings) each time a particular page is accessed.
It would be beneficial to provide a method and a system that adjusts the display parameters of a web browser in accordance with a particular web page and particular viewing capabilities of a browsing appliance, for achieving better consistent viewing of the web page.
The exemplary illustrative technology provided herein is directed to a method and a system for using information related to the characteristics of a particular web page or other publication to set the display characteristics of the display unit for that page.
In one exemplary illustrative non-limiting implementation, an online service for a community of users using a common type of display appliance is provided. Every time any user requests a particular web page, a server determines whether a set of characteristic parameters associated with the particular page, including zoom level, screen coordinates and text size, has been set previously by that or any other user. The server compares the acquired set of parameters with data stored in a history file and requests and provides the page using page parameters that are fitted or optimized for the particular display appliance.